Noah Purifoy made it his life long duty to seek art everywhere in everything, and to do so with tremendous poise and discernment. The retrospective Junk Dada on view at LACMA is breathtakingly inventive and, if nothing else, speaks to the unending seductiveness of the found object. Transformation drives all the work in this exhibition – the idea that something can exist as more than itself, or signify a variety of ideas and ways of being. Works like Untitled (Bed Headboard) 1958 reconfigure a familiar object into a strangely Cubist-like amalgam of shapes, but the show- stoppers here are the desert installations where one can clearly see Purifoy’s incredible commitment to sheer expansiveness.

LACMA

5905 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Show on view thru Sept. 27, 2015